This disclosure relates generally to presenting content to users of a third party system that communicates with an online system, and more specifically selecting content for a third party system user based at least in part on an accuracy of an age or other characteristic predicted for the third party system by the online system.
An online system allows its users to connect to and to communicate with other users. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of online systems and the significant amount of user-specific information maintained by online systems, an online system allows users to easily communicate information about themselves to other users and share content with other users.
Further, many online systems communicate with third party systems external to the online system. An online system may provide content to a third party system for presentation to users of the third party system. Additionally, some third party systems may authorize an online system to access information maintained by the third party system for users of the third party system. For example, a third party system authorizes an online system to access at least a subset of information that the third party system includes in a profile for a user of the third party system. The online system may use the information accessed from the third party system to select content for a user of the third party system that the online system provides to the third party system.
Many online systems maintain characteristics associated with their users and select content for presentation to various users based on the characteristics associated with the users. Similarly, various third party systems maintain characteristics associated with users of the third party systems that are used by various third party systems to select content for third party system users. Various characteristics associated with a user may be asserted by the user to an online system or to a third party system. For example, a user asserts an age to the online system, which stores the age in association with the user. However, a third party system communicating with the online system may not maintain characteristics of a user of the third party system that the online system uses to select content. For example, a third party system does not maintain age asserted or a gender asserted by a third party system user with the third party system. However, characteristics that are not maintained by a third party system may be used by an online system that communicates with the third party system to select content, limiting the effectiveness of content items selected by the online system for a user of the third party system. For example, if a third party system does not maintain an age for a user of the third party system, the online system is unable to identify whether content items identifying a particular age range are suitable for presentation to the user of the third party system from the information maintained by the third party system.